Category Archives: Indigenous

The Mexican president who put the Mexican Army onto the streets
to stop the drug war, resulting in 40,000+ deaths, many
collateral damage like
the son of writer Carlos Fuentes,
the Mexican president who
a year ago started hinting that that didn’t work and something else should be done,
is already following the path of his predecessors
Ernesto Zedillo and
Vicente Fox, in calling for the U.S.
to end the war on drugs.
Georgia can’t afford to continue spending a billion dollars a year to lock people up, especially while cutting education.
If we listen to the Mexican presidents, we can save much of that billion and spend much of the savings on education.

In an interview recorded last month for this week’s special report
on Mexico, Mr Calderón said: “Are there still drugs in Juárez [a
violent northern border city]? Well of course, but it has never been
the objective…of the public-security strategy to end something
that it is impossible to end, namely the consumption of drugs or
their trafficking…

“[E]ither the United States and its society, its government and its
congress decide to drastically reduce their consumption of drugs, or
if they are not going to reduce it they at least have the moral
responsibility to reduce the flow of money towards Mexico, which
goes into the hands of criminals. They have to explore even market
mechanisms to see if that can allow the flow of money to reduce.

“If they want to take all the drugs they want, as far as I’m
concerned let them take them. I don’t agree with it but it’s their
decision, as consumers and as a society. What I do not accept is
that they continue passing their money to the hands of killers.”

The Economist article spelled out what Calderón still doesn’t quite say:

Who could have forseen this?
Well, other than anyone who actually knows Georgia farmers.
And the VDT becomes thought leader to the world:

“Maybe this should have been prepared for, with farmers’ input. Maybe
the state should have discussed the ramifications with those directly
affected. Maybe the immigration issue is not as easy as &lquo;send them
home,&rquo; but is a far more complex one in that maybe Georgia needs them,
relies on them, and cannot successfully support the state’s No. 1
economic engine without them.”

Except of course HB 87 doesn’t just send them home:
it also locks up as many as it can catch, to the profit
of private prison company CCA, at the expense of we the taxpayers.

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants
out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is,
well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

Whether you’re talking about grid tied power here in America tied to the wire,
or solar in the rural countryside of Uganda,
it’s immediately available and accessible in all sizes.
So I can use it to power a cell phone, charge a laptop,
put light in a school, or pump water in a hospital.
Solar is immediately available to do that, without massive
which is a barrier to development in much of the developing world.

And to development in south Georgia, for that matter.
So we can
leapfrog that barrier with solar.

Solar power is the peoples power –Alden Hathaway
Commissioning Ceremony,
Wiregrass Solar, Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 12 May 2011.
Videos by John S. Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

Today, a number of Native tribes, from the Lakota in the Dakotas to
the Iroquois Confederacy in New York to the Anishinaabeg in Wisconsin,
battle to preserve the environment for those who are yet to come. The
next seven generations, the Lakota say, depend upon it.

“Traditionally, we’re told that as we live in this world, we have
to be careful for the next seven generations,” says Loretta Cook. “I
don’t want my grandkids to be glowing and say, ‘We have all these
bad things happening to us because you didn’t say something about it.’

Debby Tewa spent her first 10 years living without electricity, water,
or a telephone in a three-room stone house in an isolated area of the
Hopi Reservation in Arizona.

Today, as a contractor to the Sandia National Laboratories Sandia
Tribal Energy Program, she provides technical advice about maintaining
photovoltaic (PV) units to people on Indian reservations who live remotely
like she did. For many, it’s the first time they’ve had electricity
in their homes.

“I can identify with the people I’m helping,” Tewa says. “Many
live the way I grew up, and I fully appreciate their excitement in having
electricity and light at night.”

In a facebook conversation, someone said solar was useless because
we should all live like “the indigenous” used to.
Well, let’s see what some of “the indigenous” think about solar power.
Zachary Shahan wrote 13 January 2010 in CleanTechnical,
Native American Tribe Going for Solar, and Money:

The 3,000 members of the Jemez Pueblo tribe in New Mexico are looking
to build the first utility-scale solar power plant on tribal land. They
are also looking to make some money on it.

It is no secret that Native American tribes are more likely to be
poverty-stricken and they generally have more than twice the unemployment
rate of the United States. Former Jemez Pueblo governor James Roger
Magdalena says, “We don’t have any revenue coming in except for a
little convenience store.”

It is estimated this solar power plant could generate $25 million over the
next quarter century and help create a sustainable revenue for his tribe.